> Failure free operations require experience with failure.

This is why we created Chaos Engineering. By constantly forcing failure, it made us always create systems in defense of that failure, and gave us great data on where the tipping point is for different systems within a particular failure mode.

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obscurette 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's much more universal and complicated than that. One of the big issues schools and pedagogy in general struggle with is that our environment is far too safe in too many ways. For kids there is too few ways to learn from failures. Attempts to solve the issue look often like "Hey, kids, let's fall over now all at once in safest way possible and learn from it!". But it doesn't work at all. Real failures have to be unexpected, related to your decisions and really hurt so that you can learn from them.

PS. Btw, I am certain that this is the main cause of the mental health crisis amongst young people.

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eskimobloood 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> One of the big issues schools and pedagogy in general struggle with is that our environment is far too safe in too many ways. For kids there is too few ways to learn from failures.

Its cause we already learned from our failures and make the world a safer place. In my youth we climbed on trees, one of my friend fall down broke his arm, the doctor couldn't fix it and he can not move the hand for the rest of his live. My friend would be happy do not been allowed to climb, or at least under safer conditions but have his hand moveable still. I burned myself really heavy with fireworks as teenager and have a huge scar from it. I never touched any firework after this but also never bought it for my kids, so they never had the chance to "learn" from making the the same mistake. Keep in mind that while claiming the world is too safe you say this from a perspective of an survivor.

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jedberg 2 hours ago | parent [-]

There's a fine line between "we made the world safer" and "we made the world too constricting to learn". I would like my kids to be allowed to fail a bit more often, while still staying safe. I think we've swung too far in the safe direction.

	▲	GolfPopper an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The difficult part is judging where that "happy medium" is. (And then how to get there.)

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jedberg 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I agree with you. Kids aren't allowed to fail anymore. And as a parent, when I try to let my kid fail, I get scolded for being a bad parent. Broken bones used to be a right of passage for kids. Now it happens far less. While a broken bone sucks, it teaches you important lessons! Don't do that again, and hey, you messed up but you're fine now.

	▲	Vinnl an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I feel like painfully falling without breaking bones are pretty good lessons already, and I don't quite see what the broken bones add there.

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AlotOfReading 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I've always struggled to apply this to the systems I work on. If the system fails, someone potentially dies, though in practice they've never been more than hospitalized. To avoid that, huge amounts of effort are expended on failure modelling and testing, but that doesn't eliminate unknown unknowns. That discrepancy has made front page news a couple times.

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jedberg 2 hours ago | parent [-]

When I was at Netflix and reddit, one thing I said often was, "Luckily, we are not a bank". And it sounds like you are working on even more critical systems than that.

Chaos engineering doesn't really apply to data critical or safety critical systems. You can't just break them in the real world to see how they fail.

You have it exactly right -- it has to be modeled and tested in lab conditions. Safety critical systems are not a place for YOLO development.

	▲	YZF an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It's still a tool in the tool box. Somewhat analogous to accelerated life testing in non-software products. You induce conditions that make failures more likely to occur.